Irregularity
by Laryna6
Summary: RMX4 Ending AU. X has known Zero for a long time: he can tell when something's not right. Right now, something is very wrong. Wrong enough that it's overshadowing even Iris' death. Semi-X/Zero, although they've got bigger things to worry about.
1. Chapter 1

Haven't composed a story in an actual Word doc in ages.

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the intellectual property Capcom does: this includes Rockman. And Sparda and Eva too, sadly. Though they are not in this. They're too busy helping the rest of my DMC muses get ready for the DMC4 launch party.

Right after X's ending of X4, though I'm keeping the Zero angsty stuff in this because I can and I'm mean.

Divided into chapters for easier reading 6/25/10, as part of me getting back to old projects.

* * *

When X came back to Earth, he wasn't sure what to say to Zero. He'd asked Zero to kill him if he ever became a maverick, and he'd expected solemn agreement. They both would rather die: it had been an unspoken pact. Why did saying it out loud force Zero to end the conversation?

Zero was also hesitating: he should have been rushing forward to examine X as soon as he got out of the shuttle, to lecture his former student on every mistake he had made and verify the once-rookie was still in one piece.

Yet he too hung back, ashamed.

Because of Iris? Because of X's request to kill him like he had his love? Oh, Zero.

Forgetting his own pain as he did every time something must be done to help another, X went to him. "Zero, I'm sorry I asked you that."

Zero couldn't find words, sorrow and pity and guilt, other emotions shifted across his face despite the fact he always kept it well-guarded. X knew him too well to be fooled by the stoic mask, sadly. His eyes pierced it, asking what was wrong, and Zero tried to pull away before he caved. "It's not going to happen, so don't worry about it. Come on, we have to be debriefed, and you have to be tested. Stupid paranoia, testing you when we just had Double… they harass us and they can't find the real, the real mavericks." Zero had faltered there. The real mavericks?

Repliforce.

Iris and Colonel. "Zero," X put his hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry I reminded you. I wasn't as close to them as you were, but Iris and Colonel, they were almost like you and me, in a way. It's terrible what happened."

"Iris wasn't you." What an odd thing to say, and what an odd tone to say it with. Zero was still turned away, and had walked out from under X's hand as soon as it was placed on his armor. "Come on."

"Of course Iris wasn't me. What happened to… why does that matter so much?" He didn't understand.

Now Zero paused, and X could read hidden pain, shame in every line of his body. The same guilt that had been there before he became the hero, when he was still the ex-Irregular, the murderer who killed so many hunters, the one who might go mad again at any time. A lot of them had wanted him to, needled him in hope for an excuse to get vengeance.

The pain caused by knowledge he'd killed innocents. Like Iris, like Colonel. "Zero," X said more firmly, prepared to insist on this talk, since he hated seeing Zero like this. He gripped Zero's shoulder, or tried to.

Zero darted out of reach, almost flinched away from X's hand, and X pulled it back, shock and pain radiating from his eyes as Zero spun to address him. "Don't tou-" Then Zero seemed to regain control, and the anger died away. "X, just… stay away from me for awhile." He clearly regretted having met X's eyes: if he had avoided them then he could have left after saying that, but seeing the pain he had to ease it. "I know you want to help, but I need some time."

Then Zero read his student as well as X read him. He'd been able to just turn off the com before, but with X right in front of him it was so very hard. Zero just didn't know what to do, clearly, caught on a knife edge between the desire to help X and the desire not to, not to harm him? X took a step forward, puzzled. Zero drew back.

This was odd. If Zero just didn't want to talk, he'd have left. That Zero was staying meant that he really did want to talk, and was hoping that X would help him do so. Yet he was stepping back, he didn't want to be touched. He was afraid of what might happen if X was… too close to him? Touching him?

Oh, no. "Zero," X asked carefully, "have you been tested yet?" That was a ridiculous question, he knew that as soon as he said it.

"Yes, of course." Zero's tone imitated wry puzzlement as to why X would possibly ask something like that. Of course he'd been tested. Of course they hadn't found anything.

Zero was trying far too hard to act normal, act like there wasn't anything wrong, but they knew each other too well for that. "Zero, I know you're hiding something." There, it was out in the open, and the guards on the tarmac would ramp up their alert status. Just in case it was necessary. They, and he, hoped it wouldn't be.

Zero opened his mouth to try to lie, but he was still caught in X's gaze and closed it a breath later knowing he couldn't fool him.

X moved to take a step forward and Zero's body tensed, preparing to draw back. "Why don't you want me near you?" Oh no. "Tell me you don't think," his dawning horror vibrated in his tone.

"No!" Zero cut him off, utter rejection of the very idea. "X, no. It's not you…" He'd meant to say "it's not you, it's me," a common phrase meaning that it wasn't that X was repulsive, it was that Zero was the one with the problem with being close to him. Yet the horror in his eyes when he realized what he was about to say revealed that the choice of phrase was one that was far too true.

Please don't let it be true, X's eyes begged, and Zero wanted to reassure him but could not bring himself to, to lie. "Zero, no." Oh no, this can't be happening, not you!

"X…" Zero was torn between stepping forward to reassure him and back to retreat from the pain of this revelation.

Seeing this, X almost collapsed with relief. "Zero, you're being paranoid. The tests were clear, and a maverick wouldn't feel guilty about being one." X stepped forward, intending to take his arm. "Is it because Iris was declared a maverick but didn't have the virus?" Let me help you, Zero. I need to help someone because I failed all of them. "Let's go get you retested since I'm going there anyway, and then we'll go to debriefing, and then we'll talk."

"I know the tests won't show anything." X opened his mouth and this time was the one to shut it as Zero continued. "I don't know if there's anything still there, since Dr. Cain wiped my systems when I was brought in." Still there? "But there might be. X, I've been having dreams… or that was what I thought they were, normal nanite to system reintegrating, but it wasn't, or… The wipe wasn't complete. I've been having flashbacks. When I fought Sigma today, I remembered fighting him as an Irregular. X, I…" Zero couldn't say it, he so deeply wished it wasn't true.

"Zero, you know Sigma says things, does things to mess with people's heads! So he made you hallucinate! Why on earth are you letting him trick you like this!" X was outraged, not at Zero but at Sigma. Yet even X's reserve could be worn thin, and to see his friend like this was just too much. Now he was angry, and Sigma was not here.

"It's not a trick, X." Such sadness there, as he revealed that, "Sigma didn't remember it either until then. It wasn't even Cain's attempt at a wipe that fried my memories, it was the virus getting screwed up because I was fighting it and Sigma wasn't what it was targeted at."

"How could you have the same flashback at the same time?" It only made sense if it was faked, or true. True was not an option, so it had to be a clumsy fake.

"The virus. It was meant to link to me. I don't remember, so when I did, even for an instant, it worked the way it was supposed to."

So much sorrow, he was so very sorry, and X did not want him to feel this way. He moved forward, this time determined not to let Zero move away or escape this. He would not lose his friend.

"X, don't!" That wasn't Zero: that was Alia. The guards were aiming weapons. "Commander Zero, please disengage your weapons and allow yourself to be secured."

Zero's eyes closed, and X knew that Alia's request (order) would not be obeyed. "Zero!" He moved forward, stopped when he heard busters being charged.

"X, I…" So much sorrow, and Zero wouldn't look at him, wouldn't let X's eyes tether him here.

"Please, Zero." I can't lose you. "I don't care if you were the one that infected Sigma! You didn't know, you didn't want to! It wasn't you, so you shouldn't feel guilty about it! I was the first reploid, it's just as much my fault that, that there are mavericks. Neither of us wanted this! You said yourself that you were fighting the virus! You've been fighting it all along!"

"Not all…" A terrible revelation in those words, and Zero's eyes flew open as he fell to his knees. "Oh god, oh god." He shook, eyes focusing on a scene of horror that played before them.

"Zero!" Now, X let nothing stop him from holding his friend, going to his own knees and gripping his partner's shoulders. "Zero! Stop it!" He'd seen this hysteria before. Never in Zero. Zero was the strong one.

"Stop it," Zero repeated blankly, wide eyes rising to meet X's. He hadn't stopped shaking when X grabbed him: he'd frozen instead. "Oh god, I… you…" So much horror. "It can't be…"

"Zero, please! Snap out of it!" X shook him, shook him hard.

"You begged me, or, you can't be him!" Such horrified denial in that plea.

Zero jerked away and X was unable to hold him in place and unwilling to let go. He ended up on top of his best friend, pinning him down, yelling at the guards who were rushing forward to stand down and back away with the commander's voice he'd copied from Zero. Zero watched, shivering now.

"I'm X, Zero. I'm not whoever you're thinking of." Once the people who didn't know what they were doing were dealt with X's tone became as soothing as he could manage. "Alia, see if you can get someone to pull up Dr. Cain's files on Zero's treatment when he was brought in. Zero, you know the symptoms of the virus. These are not them. I think there's some problem with what Dr. Cain did to cure your insanity, probably caused by something Sigma did. You're just an Irregular, Zero. Not a Maverick. It's going to be okay."

"The color of your eyes is different, the shape is different, your voice is different: you've got so much more pain in it. Similar, but not the same. So why do I look at you and see him?" Zero's hand lifted, and X had to gesture with outstretched palm for the guards to halt their reaction. The exchange went unnoticed as Zero touched X's face in a false calm achieved when things became far too much. "This was how you held your father when you found him, and you reassured him things would be okay and you would save him while he tried to get you to leave him there, told you that it had to be a trap. You knew that, though. It had never stopped you before. Until I stopped you." An empty smile. "I wasn't an Irregular. I was exactly what my creator wanted. Dr. Wily was just too insane by then to be careful what he wished for."

Dr. Wily.

Too in shock, X did nothing to prevent the rush of the guards, even let himself be pulled away without really being aware of it. His eyes didn't leave Zero as they threw a capture net over him, as it overloaded (impossible… with post-Cataclysm technology), and the guards awaited an order to fire, pulling back as Zero slowly rose. X might have been pleading for them not to fire, he didn't know.

Zero smiled at him when he stood up, that terrible lost smile that spoke of more pain that any scream. "You can't scan me anyway, and destroying this body won't kill me. It's been tried. I wish it had worked."

"What are your intentions?" How had Alia ended up in default command? Oh, right, the guards here were all from X and Zero's units, there weren't any officers left, and she had a non-combat commission. Really, she was a good person to be handling this. X really wasn't up to it right now.

"I don't know what to do. I can't destroy the virus unless I can decrypt the command lines, and if I can't do that in less than a century there's no way you can at all, so it really wouldn't have helped anything if I had told you. I was going to just… do what I could to help." Zero clearly meant help X, eyes fixed on him. "I didn't want you to know. I didn't want…" Now Zero was the one to reach out pleadingly and stop when busters were readied. He drew back, drawing into himself. "I'm sorry, X. I'm so sorry." His face was buried in his hands, hair that normally was perfectly arranged flying around wildly, whipping in a wind that couldn't happen in a shuttle pad with the roof hatch sealed the way it was. Looking up after a still moment, he revealed that, "I didn't remember that until now, about who the man was and Rock… You're so much like him. You don't think you measure up but you're the same, you're just as much a hero as he was. As Megaman."

Those had the ring of last words, the words Zero wanted to leave him with, to comfort him, that X cried out, "No! I'm not! I couldn't have done this without you, Zero, I still can't! I don't care what you did when the virus controlled you!"

"I killed you, X. I killed everyone. Your family. Mine. Blues'. Billions of other people. I don't deserve to live, but I can't die or no one will ever be able to destroy the virus." The horror was surpassing the capabilities of even that terrible calm, that last defense against the loss of sanity. "I don't know if it's even possible for me to die."

"Oh god, Zero," and now X had to try to fight loose of the guards that held him back, to go to comfort his friend.

"You still, you still want to help me. How can you? Why can't you just hate me? You weren't even able to kill Dr. Wily. If you had, I never would have been created. I wish I never had been."

"Don't say that!"

"Do you know how many people have died because I was born?" Now Zero was angry. "I'm not worth their lives, how can you say that X!"

"You can't change the past, but you are here now! You can change the future! Stop this, Zero! You've never surrendered, so why won't you fight this?" X's demands turned to pleas in the end. "Please, Zero."

"My name is Omega. Weird that Sigma also is a Greek letter, isn't it?"

"You're Zero. Omega was a maverick controlled by the virus. You are Zero who has spent all his life fighting the virus. How can you think that I'm a hero when I'm only here because of you? Because you sacrificed yourself for me, because you taught me. Helped me, because knowing you were out there gave me the strength to go on. Not wanting to disappoint you helped me do so many things I didn't think I could."

"You wouldn't have had to do them if it weren't for me." It was clear in those eyes that if Zero could have died to atone, he would have.

"For Wily! Damn it, Zero! You're a Maverick Hunter! You know it's not the person's fault, it's the virus'! Why should you be any different? Just because you're Zero and you've carried guilt for something that wasn't your fault around for years already because it was blamed on you by people who wanted a target? The hunters you killed weren't your fault. What the virus made you do isn't either. Get it through your head, Zero! You may be the greatest person I've ever known, but as hard as you try, as often as you succeed in pulling off miracles, you are not God! You're always telling me not to blame myself for people who died when there was nothing I could do, it's just as foolish for you to do it!"

"That same righteous wrath, only this time you want to save me." Zero laughed, not out of amusement but hysteria.

X's attempt to go to him was restrained. "Will someone slap him for me?" Stares from the hunters. "If you're not going to let me do it, one of you has to. Any volunteers? Because I can and will make that a direct order."

They looked at Alia, who was already moving. Normally very kind, Alia could be a bitch when the situation called for it and this was a perfectly executed stop-being-a-moron bitchslap.

Alia was very hard to ignore, and Zero did indeed stop to stare at her, amazed at her daring. So was everyone else. Alia blinked. "What? I've wanted a reason to do that since I met him. Do you know how long I scrimped and saved to afford the perfect hair? And his is better than mine and he takes it for granted!"

That was so amazingly petty by comparison to everything that had been going on here since X arrived that everyone besides Alia and Zero had to make themselves stop laughing when Alia raised her hand to the ready position, making it very clear there were plenty more where that came from. She, however, clearly realized how petty and impulsive it had been, what a bad idea it was to have the person giving orders get this close to the Maverick, and was having to fight down the fear that she was now infected.

It really was a terrible situation if even Alia, with her scientific training, was becoming irrational. Thank goodness for the comic relief, although Alia promised pain to anyone who referred to it as such as she carefully stepped back from Zero instead of scrambling to get away, holding her hand to the side instead of letting it touch her anywhere.

"Don't worry," Zero told her. "You can't catch it from me like that."

"Can it be caught from you?" She had to ask.

"It only does it automatically when my body gets disabled or destroyed after having a few seconds at emergency level stress to prepare. Anyone who can take me out is someone the virus wants. Sigma's been the only one, and the emergency level stress was me trying to keep the virus from making me kill him and frying some systems. It didn't even happen when I blew myself up that time."

"You said automatically." Alia was good at noticing key details.

"I can customize specialized viruses and release them, though I don't have that much control."

Alia considered. "Doppler. His vaccine. He was trying to convert the virus to a harmless form, only he missed the auto-restore coding so the vaccine worked until it turned itself into virus. I think Dr. Wily must have hoped something like that would be attempted. We can't get rid of it, but can you make something without the auto-restore coding?"

"I actually can." Zero's amazement was clear. "It would be unstable, and self-destruct in six months or so when the auto-restore coding is supposed to kick in, because the reason I can do that is for things that are supposed to only work temporarily and not be noticed." Still, it was hope. "I can't make it as harmless as his version, I have only so much parameter control, but I could give you a version without the auto-restore coding and most of the obvious symptoms, at least, and then you could convert that into the vaccine? Would that work?"

"Zero, this is why you should have just told them. I know being a lab rat in the hands of people who really didn't like you didn't give you a very good impression of scientists other than Dr. Cain, and no one's ever been able to do anything about the virus, you're right, but you're not the only person who has good ideas." X's long-suffering tone conveyed how tired he was of Zero trying to do everything himself.

"I know. I just didn't remember any of that until this conversation."

"And you didn't want to think about it, because you knew on some level how terrible what happened to you was. Otherwise you would have wanted to know more. You're always asking Intel for more information." X understood, forgave.

"I really can't bear this, X." The mood granted by Alia's idea evaporated. "I can't stop remembering now. All those people, X, all those people." Pleading in that face, and it was amazing that Zero, the rock that X had leaned on, asked him for help now.

"Let go of me," X told the guards, and now it was clear from his tone that he was thinking clearly, thank you, this was an order from their commanding officer in his right mind, and there would be consequences if it was not obeyed.

No one wanted to have to slap Zero again, so he was obeyed.

This time Zero let X hold him. "I don't know what I can do, Zero, except say that I forgive you." Zero opened his mouth and X held a finger to his lips. "I know that you're going to say that I won't feel that way after I know everything. So tell me everything so you know that it's not ignorance. It's because I know you, and I know you're a good person who would not have done those things of their own free will. It wasn't your fault, and you've been trying to make up for it since before you even knew it was your responsibility. You didn't run away or break down when you remembered, which is probably what Sigma wanted. I'm so proud to be your partner."

Zero's tears had finally started to trickle down, as X's sympathy broke down the barrier so hastily erected against him. "Oh god. Will you kill me?" Please?

"I'll have to think about that. I don't want you to die, but if you can convince me that there really is no other way for you to stop hurting, then maybe." X squeezed him. "Of if you don't stay dead, would it make you feel better if I did?"

"Oh yes, it would." X felt Zero's nod, his mentor-turned-child's head now tucked beneath the shelter of his chin. "But if we find a way for me to stay dead, I want it to be you who frees me. Please. I don't want to outlive you. Wily wanted me to destroy you, and I want to die knowing that you'll be able to be happy despite me."

Zero. X held him tightly: there was nothing he could find to say to that for quite awhile. "It would make me very happy to be with you and know that you could go on without me and be fine too. So we'll see." He kissed the top of Zero's helmet briefly.

"I love you so much. I wanted to love Iris, but in the end she just didn't measure up to you, and I knew all along that I could never be with you even if I didn't know the real reason why." So much sadness.

"Why not?" X realized he had never really thought about that either. How odd. He considered long-standing friendships the best foundation for permanent relationships, and yet he'd never really looked at Zero that way. Zero was beautiful, so very strong, trustworthy beyond doubt, he did love X so very, very much, and X loved him. Yet Zero had never been approachable, never been open to the idea before Iris, and X had been glad she's managed to break through his shell, and then had to try very hard not to think jealous thoughts.

So he was jealous of Iris, not Zero. Oh.

"You're the one who spent all that time studying reploid design. You know how our sex equivalent works. Extreme emotional state followed by knockout caused by someone else: I can't keep that from triggering the virus. Thank god Iris and I decided to take it slow enough we never actually got there."

"But I'm immune," X pointed out. That made it perfect, really.

"Not that immune. The standard virus, sure. But you're Dr. Light's final creation. If you were the target, it'd whip one up special. You're immune because the extra hibernation made your personality so strong the virus can't win against it in a direct fight, like me. So what it would have to do is find ways to work around it. So don't be stupid." Listening, X also heard Zero's system winding down. That was good, that Zero was getting comfortable enough to be able to rest. Hopefully he would feel better in the morning.

"Go to sleep, Zero. I'll keep an eye on you and you need the rest, they're going to be working you hard tomorrow."

"I hate being a lab rat." Zero sighed but closed his eyes and went into sleep mode obediently.

Still, this wasn't a good place to spend the night. "Alia, do you have coordinates for where they want him in Medical?"

"I'll forward them to you." Zero's teleport access must have already been disabled: X would have to bring him along with him the same way they transported prisoners. Not quite fair to Zero, but it was to be expected, really.

Receiving them, X nodded. "I think we can wait for debriefing in the morning, when everyone has had some time to think this over. Units 17 and 00, you're on yet more overtime tonight. I don't want someone attacking him, and I trust you to know better."

"Commander." Salutes from the people who had ended up ranking in the decimated units.

"Unit 00, link your teleport systems to mine, as your Commander's codes are disabled for the moment." The order was quickly obeyed, and when everyone had linked in to use X's authorization codes for the group teleport X slaved Zero's system to his so that X's codes could be used for both of them.

Then there was a blinding flash of light.

X blinked once his vision cleared, his receptors having shut down briefly to avoid being burnt out. "What was that?"

Alia was already moving. "Zero was the origin." Not good. "You were doing final teleport preparations… maybe being…" She didn't want to finish that thought. "Let's teleport in right now."

X nodded.


	2. Chapter 2

As soon as they arrived, X gave the orders he hoped Aila already had. "Disable my teleport codes and get a virus scanner now!"

Teleport system slaving meant one could be taken anywhere on earth. Sleep was a semi-defenseless state. Zero had just been through an amazing amount of emotional pain.

X had assisted Dr. Cain for years. He could do this math perfectly well, although Alia had gotten it first and her attitude had made him aware there was something to get. He was a little rusty. "I don't feel any different," he assured all of the people standing there with horror dawning as they realized they might have just lost the only two immune reploids on the planet with Sigma still out there. "But that might be the idea."

X stepped away from Zero to be scanned only reluctantly, and frowned. "I think… make it a very through scan. This would be a custom virus, if it is there."

"Did you notice something?" Alia had picked up on it and was the first to ask.

"I am very uncomfortable with him lying there asleep and surrounded by people who might hurt or dissect him. It's irrational, this is MMHQ and you're all professionals. It might just be that it's been quite a day. Still, keep scanning." Nothing yet.

"Nothing found by the anti-virus scan of the nanite sample, but if it's atypical that could miss it," the new head technician reported. "No aversion to humans, no anti-social tendencies..." Since X's systems were so scan-resistant, they'd started to check his responses to stimuli that mavericks were programmed by the virus to have certain responses to. "Not especially fond of Sigma…" Okay, he'd found something. "Your default response to an attack by Sigma went from fight to flight."

"Recheck the nanite sample until you find it or have cleared every last one in there." X started to disable his weapon systems and remove the components.

"Why are you so sure?" This was a little extreme a conclusion to draw so quickly.

"Zero implied that a virus would have to work within my preset personality to affect me. I do not like fighting. The virus could hopefully not make me hate or kill innocents if what he said about the nature of immunity is accurate. It could, theoretically, render me a non-threat by strengthening my dislike of violence enough to incapacitate me as a Hunter." There, the last ones removed and put on the table. "I don't know if it has. I always have had an aversion to violence. The only way to test that reliably would be to put me in the field, and that is an extremely bad idea at present. Keep running the stimuli tests."

"Most of them look for sudden personality shift and antisocial tendencies." And hence wouldn't find much if that hypothesis were valid, given X's stability.

X looked thoughtfully at Zero again. "Too bad we don't have a baseline for my response to him as a stimulus." He sighed. "It's probably not going to be allowed for us to share a room here, in case I am still uninfected."

"You're really not happy with that."

"It's also that I was already planning to sit by his bed. I didn't want him alone with this. What's odd is that I feel such a need to protect him. He was always the one who protected me. Perhaps an element is the desire to return the favor, but he's immortal to whatever degree and he'd be much happier if I were safe. Yet I still want very much to be holding him right now." X grimaced. "If I'm not there, he's going to wonder why, because I said I would be and he knows how much of a mother hen I am. If he finds out he may have infected me that might be what finally breaks him. He's already suicidal."

Alia, having been fully scanned, rested a lead-lined nanite-killer glove on X's shoulder. "How about we have you in the same testing room so you can keep an eye on him and be there when he wakes up?"

"If you're moving him, hook me up first. I am not liking the idea of him being out of my sight and I want to see how extreme the reaction is."

When the bed Zero was on was rolled out of the room, X found himself out of the chair and two steps closer to the door before he realized he should stop following him. It was an effort. "That is not natural."

They all had to agree, as much as they didn't want to.

"Zero's going to be quite upset. An observation room without other people would be a good idea for when he wakes up. Don't take out the furniture. I hope he'll be healthy enough to break things." Instead of break himself. X rested his head in his hand when he arrived in the room Zero was in now. "I should have thought of this. Zero trusted me."

"You're blaming yourself?" Glances were exchanged.

"Teleport slaving wasn't around in 20XX, despite the fact their overall technology was quite advanced, and Zero has always had an aversion to anything technical. They had to put in a subroutine in his teleport system to handle linking in his unit for him. Nowadays most people have those, but in the old days they wanted you to be able to do it manually." X sighed. "He's going to worry it was some unconscious-level viral manipulation of his thoughts, or something. I don't think that's likely, unless the virus itself has an AI capable of that sort of planning, but I'm not the most objective source at the moment."

"I didn't think of it either until after the fact," Alia tried to comfort him. "And I'm more up to date, and never infected."

"Still. He trusted me." Ah, hospital clothes. X took off the last of his armor when the gown arrived while answering some final questions. "Do you need me for anything else? It's been a long day for me too."

"I'd like to keep you hooked up while asleep," one requested.

Head turning to Zero, X sighed again. "Yes, do that. I don't think I'll be able to sleep on a separate bed. I've been fighting it somewhat, but I don't want to try to relax while doing that, and it might be good to see what happens when I let myself go along with this."

What happened was that X carefully tucked himself against Zero and both of them in, and felt so very comfortable, right, and safe there he fell asleep quickly. That was nice, he'd lie awake for hours for weeks after a war normally.

Unless something else turned up, this wasn't so bad, to have an excuse to stay by Zero. It could be worse, and it certainly wasn't intolerable. It might be to Zero, though.

They were beautiful, lying there together, X smiling softly and sweetly in his sleep, holding Zero as if to comfort him but being comforted in return. Zero had put himself into a deep enough sleep that he could be tested on and his armor removed without being woken up too early and startling the doctors. He hadn't reacted to anything yet, but the small motor movements of a dreaming reploid running systems tests didn't begin until X was in his arms. Over the night, the pain on his face eased and he and X became even more wrapped around each other. So very peaceful, after so much turmoil.

To the onlookers, it was a terrible beauty. They would have wanted their heroes to be happy, but where in that tight embrace were they, was the world? Mavericks were legally dead, so both their champions were lost. They might prove that they never had been mavericks, not really, but for now they had to be treated as such, so Alia and others had to find excuses to leave to cry out of sight.

When she came back, she checked over the data again. If only they could scan them more completely. "These readings, it's almost like they're being sedated. X is usually calm, but too happy right now for these circumstances, and the readings from Zero show that since X joined him his stress level has been dropping rapidly, as well as emotional pain level, and Zero is never calm." Nor especially happy, normally. "Why would Zero be affected like this by the virus?" Or was it by the virus?

"Possibly as a reward for finally infecting Dr. Wily's enemy and an incentive to keep X under control." Lifesaver was a nice person, really, but you'd never know it from his tendency to play devil's advocate and raise the possibilities others didn't want to contemplate, or admit to out loud.

"Quite possibly." The fact that Alia would have liked it to be more than that didn't mean the possibility could be ignored. An alarm beeped on the monitor, and she returned her gaze to the observation window X and… the subjects slept behind. Zero was starting to wake up, systems coming out of sleep mode.

Microphones picked up a quiet noise of complaint: Zero was comfortable the way he was but it was time to wake up now. His arms tightened around X and he nosed his hair, reluctant to leave him for the outside world. Still mostly asleep, Zero's distress wasn't on a level he was conscious of yet, and the movements weren't so much more dramatic than others throughout the night, such as being wheeled into this room, but X started to rouse as well, worried.

A soft little sound from the smaller of the two: are you okay? And don't wake up, stay with me. Zero's semi-growl of irritation with the world and all things he had to do in it that required waking up and leaving X was louder this time as processes continued to boot up. He still unwrapped his arms from around X and used one to push himself up into more of a sitting position, head slowly clearing and eyes opening as he did so.

He was taking visual input before his processor had come fully online, clearly, as there was a moment where he was looking at X and he didn't seem to really register him other than as something in Zero's bed. Then Zero blinked, registering the fact that there was indeed something odd in his bed and this was something that needed to be dealt with, causing systems to come to readiness more quickly.

Still not fully awake, which was very unusual for him, Zero recognized this as X. "What?" His eyes closed and the hand that wasn't keeping him propped up covered his face. "X, what happened last night?" Zero paused, then responded as though he'd heard a response. "X, take pity on me, I have a hangover and I think a couple days are hidden by the blur. Just tell me it was a threesome."

Did he actually have a hangover? He did, they quickly verified. 'Overload hangovers' were caused by too much physical and emotional stimuli being processed. Zero's turmoil was indeed enough to cause one. However, the more common cause, reploids being careful to avoid that sort of stress, was the use of recreational substances and often sex under the influence of them, which was what Zero seemed to be assuming had happened.

"We didn't have a threesome with Iris? Oh god, what am I going to tell her?" Zero fell back down onto the bed. "It's not your fault, X, I'm the one with a girlfriend, I should have been more careful. How on earth did we end up getting drunk?" The hangover was keeping his reasoning functions from working properly until the remnants of the overload were repaired. "We didn't have sex or get drunk? Then why are we in a bed and why do I feel like scrap?" Zero looked around. "We're in medical? So we got hit with something?" Transparent relief. Whatever this was, he clearly felt, it had to be better than having cheated on Iris with X.

By this time, X had managed to fully wake up, unhindered by hangover. He sorrowfully wrapped his arms around Zero.

"X, can you just tell me what's going on?" Zero looked down at X, noticing something was off.

"Can someone get an overload counteragent for Zero?" X asked the watchers in the window, helping Zero sit up. Zero allowed himself to be repositioned, focused on something else.

"X, did you learn ventroloquism and didn't tell me?" X looked at him and Zero paused again, listening. "Yes, you've gotten really good at it, I don't see your lips move at all."

Seemingly making a conscious effort to do so, X responded aloud. "Zero, just wait until they bring the counteragent. It's a long story. Why don't you just lie down again for now?" X gently pushed him back onto the bed.

"Yeah, that sounds good." Zero's eyes closed. "I've never had a hangover before, and I didn't even get to enjoy being drunk for the first time to get this one. That sucks. I'm going to kill Sigma again and make it stick this time," he declared, quite clearly out of it as his systems started to cool down from the strain of trying to process at a high level despite the overload.

Quietly, X lay down next to him and held him, so sad at what would happen when the counteragent was kicked in. Zero wrapped his own arms around X, sensing his condition. "Oh, damn it. Who died?" X winced as Zero's eyes flew open, apparently having responded automatically and silently. "Iris!"

"Zero, just wait until they bring the counteragent," X tried to tell him. "It's a long story and you'll need to be able to think clearly and have access to your memories for debriefing."

"Debriefing? There was another war?" Zero looked utterly lost. "What happened?" To Iris.

Over the intercom, Alia informed them, "X, there's a counteragent in the supply chute, red door. It's unlocked."

"Thank you." X stood up. "Zero, stay put for a second, okay?"

Zero clearly did not like X getting up and leaving him there with so many questions, but allowed it. "We're in medical _quarantine? _What on earth did we get hit with?" He didn't follow X, but pushed himself up again, body wanting to reach for him.

They were actually wanting him to tell them.

"Zero," X said firmly, the tone saying that this wasn't Zero's ex-student and fellow officer with less seniority speaking, this was Dr. Cain's research partner and hence the orders he were about to give were doctor's orders and not suggestions, "Attempting to decode overload-fogged memories before the overload damage is cleaned up can destroy those memories. We need those memories. Stop panicking, calm down, let this work," X expertly took Zero's arm and injected the cleaner nanites without giving Zero the option to do anything about it, "and do your duty, Hunter!" The tone at the end there was Zero's, the end of Zero's speech given so many times to strengthen the nerves of rookies about to collapse under the strain.

Ex-lab rat, Zero knew the futility of arguing with doctors. X's partner, he knew X couldn't be argued with either when he got like this. A Hunter commander, he knew the orders were the right ones and in the right words. "Yes, doctor sir," he murmured wryly, eyes closing again. "Just…" This was Zero asking now, not the patient or fellow soldier.

X knew what he was asking, but not what to tell him. "We're both going to be fine." That wasn't what was asked, and Zero's brow furrowed with worry that X would even think Zero needed to be reassured of that. Was there a reason to worry? "I only know that Iris died, Zero. I don't know the details. I'm sorry."

"Who?" Had he already killed them? Did he have to hunt them down?

"Zero, go to sleep."

"I'm not trying to decode the data, I'm just asking you." Zero's eyes opened a bit, annoyed that X was implying he would keep doing that.

"And it's upsetting you and that's making it harder for the nanites to repair the remnants of the overload's scrambling of your mental state and data. Go to sleep. You can't do anything about it anyway until your head is clear. Do I need to ask for a sedative?" X put his hand on Zero's forehead.

The instant lowering of Zero's tension was visible to the onlookers. "Just stay with me. I won't ask what we got hit with for now, but I don't want to lose you too."

"We're in medical quarantine, Zero. Of course I'm not leaving." Silly Zero.

Zero's eyes closed again, reassured. "Yeah, trying to think while overloaded really isn't a good idea. I keep hallucinating that you're a little kid and I thought Alia was a guy when I glanced over there and then it took me awhile to figure out who she was when she spoke and I knew she wasn't whoever I had thought she was. Weird, huh?" He chuckled a little, having found something to laugh about in this terrible uncertainty.

"Go to sleep, Zero," X restated soothingly, stroking Zero's hair. "It will help the nanites work and you'll need to restart your thought processes after they're done anyway."

"I'll try. Just keep talking, X. I feel like… Let me know you're there while I'm sleeping. Overload's really weird… I'm afraid that something will happen to you, like," Like Iris, but Zero was trying to obey X's order not to think of that now. "I know you won't disappear if I can't keep an eye on you for a second, and we're in HQ, nowhere safer on the planet, but I can't get myself to stop being afraid for you. Maybe you should use the sedative. I'm not sure I can sleep while I'm this worried." He was finally letting the strain he felt show in his voice.

"I've sent one," Alia informed them..

"Which one?" X asked.

"Standard Issue quick acting, highest dose. Why?"

"Zero's got atypical immune responses. Repair nanites are fine, but anything that tries to affect his systems without allowing him to control the process puts him on alert and makes him fully awake. Haven't you looked up his medical file?"

"It's a very big one. I just skimmed the relevant parts, sorry. What sort should I send?" Alia was furiously inputting commands.

"White Noise, the prescription ones. There are two sedative types, one tries to force the system into sleep mode and the other reduces stress and inputs soothing stimuli. The first one's more reliable so most use either just it or a combination, but it won't work on Zero. Don't use a generic: some of them do have a slight amount of the first type in there to make it more effective even though they're being marketed as equivalent to a medicine with none at all. Even human generic medicines aren't as good as they should be on quality control and it's worse for reploids, which is the reason for Cain's standing order to only use the brand version unless we do our own lab tests and verify that specific generics are usable. The company that passed the clinical trials has to keep making exactly the medication they passed the trials with, so we know their version is safe."

Alia was good on science, not on medicine side effect issues, which was why X was giving her the quick version of the lecture he had once given to interns. "Can we get a medic doctor up there?" he asked. "I'm so out of date on current medical data I'm this close to getting my license to practice revoked for failure to keep myself well enough informed to be able to safely treat patients." Alia did have a degree in medical science, but this wasn't her specialty and she had nearly sent Zero bouncing off the walls.

"I'm paging Lifesaver now." Alia was also very out of date, especially since becoming a spotter, but even though this might not be her specialty she still had gone through medical school and was aware how badly she had nearly screwed up and how inexcusable that was. You did not put a medicine, standard issue or not, into a patient without checking their records for possible dangers. You did not. Period. People died that way. Reploids could be built to avoid the equivalents of allergies and so on, so it was less of a hazard than for a human, but checking was mandatory and she knew Zero was very atypical. She should not have just sent it out without verifying it herself, even though she had been right to assume that X knew what he was doing. Thank goodness he did.

"Thank you."

"It'll be there in a minute."

X looked down at Zero, who had tuned out the conversation since medical matters were utterly out of his depth and hence something safe to ignore. "I think my speech put him to sleep, or almost, actually. Send it, but let's see if we can avoid using it. The fewer things we put in his system the fewer things in there that might distort the readings." X stroked his hair again. "You always hated being a 'lab rat.'" Poor Zero.

Hearing the sorrow in his voice, Zero frowned and started to become a little more alert. "It's okay, Zero." X leaned over the bed and hugged him. "It'll be okay." Yet he couldn't hide the sadness, the fact that it was not okay right now, from Zero. Zero could read him like a book in his sleep.

X gave up and climbed into the bed with him again. "Alia." Doctor mode. Calm, rational. He put it on like he put on armor to protect his body. "He said he needs confirmation I'm safe to be able to rest, and he seems to be picking up my distress when I speak, so I think verbal is out." He let himself snuggle against Zero, Zero semi-awake enough even if not registering the words to wrap his arms around X and tug him into place. "What are his readings at right now?" X had to fight back the urge to relax utterly to ask that.

"Stable: he's calm and will be in full pseudo-REM sleep in a minute. Your stress level just went to almost none was well." Fascinating.

"I know. It's worrying how hard it is to worry right now." How ironic. "How is the nanites sample search going?"

"They're your nanites, most of them." So they were odd and atypical by default. "The symptoms are narrowing it down a bit, what types we need to look at. No luck so far."

"Ah." Did it matter? Of course it did, what was he thinking? "Alia, this _is_ definitely affecting my thought processes as well as my emotional state. One of the basic symptoms of the virus is that the Mavericks don't care that they're infected because they like it, think it's only making them do things they should have done anyway and so on." No need to describe the condition and thoughts in detail to a researcher. "My being infected is a tremendous danger to the world, an incredible risk to myself, is going to cause Zero's mental state to collapse even further once he gets his memories back and becomes aware of it… there is no good side except that it _feels good_ and yet I just found myself thinking that identifying the virus particle did not matter. Which stems from the thought that curing me does not matter, because this is _not a bad thing_."

X was trying to be enraged and horrified: it was not working. "This should be the case anyway, but _do not trust my judgment._" That was an order. "And check the nanites that interface between judgment-making and emotional status. I should be angry, terrified, and guilty, but I cannot seem to feel that way as opposed to think that way."

"Found it, or at least one of the components," Alia reported after a moment. "It's destroying the nanites sent to signal 'negative emotions.'"

Damn it. X tucked his head under Zero's for comfort, eyes closing for a moment. "If I can't get angry enough at all he's done, then I can't overcome my… desire not to hurt people? Hatred of fighting? Sadness and the desire to deny that it's necessary?" He shook his head. "Unless we can get rid of that aspect of the virus, at _minimum_, I don't think I will be capable of forcing myself to fight Sigma." Who would save them all if he and Zero were unable to? "I was feeling sorry for Zero, and I'm worried about what will happen if neither of us can fight. I think it might only target negative emotions about the virus, ones it doesn't want me to feel."

"That's very possible." Alia tried to hide her pity behind her professional tone.

Zero stirred a little, nosed at X. "I'm fine," X assured him, though there was no truth behind it, only sadness and the hope he could shield Zero from it.

Zero held him tighter, and then it felt like it was not only X's body that was held.

A promise there, or a renewal of one. Zero would keep X safe. Body, mind, and heart. Even in his sleep he took care to protect him, could and would not rest unless X was safe and happy.

Knowing this, feeling it, X's fears were soothed. It would be okay. Zero would make sure the virus didn't destroy X. Or kill himself trying. Or break under the strain. Those were academic possibilities, and he would try his best to prevent them, but he had faith in Zero, Zero who cared for him and had protected him as long has he had known him.

Since X truly was alright now, Zero fell back into a deeper slumber. X began to join him.

"X, X!" Alia.

With a sigh X's eyes opened. "Yes, something just happened. What did you read?"

"Nanites with Zero's coding type appeared in your systems out of nowhere!"

"Oh, so that's why I felt what he felt." He really should care, but it was so hard to make himself when this felt so nice and he wanted to sleep. "He felt that I was worried, so he woke up a little to make sure that I was okay. I think it was on the instinctive level. Since I was just worried about Sigma, and the virus, and what would happen to everyone instead of an immediate threat, he reassured me: not told, but felt that of course he would take care of me and everyone else, that I was being silly to doubt that, and that I should go to sleep instead of waking him up with pointless fears."

"You know the White Noise sedative you mentioned? He is, or he's using the virus to, not sure what's going on, but he's feeding you stimuli that are soothing you and making your systems think this is the optimum time to enter sleep mode."

"Yes," X murmured, closing his eyes again. "Is there anything else you need to know now? I think it would be very tiring to fight this, and on the practical level I'd like to be well rested when Zero wakes up and realizes what has happened so I can try to do damage control." Sighing, he murmured to Zero, "It would be much easier to fight this if it wasn't you, you know. I can't think, let alone feel, that you are an enemy." Another sigh. "Of course, if you weren't you, you really would be an enemy. I'm glad that you're the vessel of the virus, really. I'm sorry that you have to bear this burden, but anyone else would be so much less able to." A little nuzzle, tender, soft, and sweet but loving as a kiss. Oh yes, Alia. Research. "We need data on how well I can fight this, but we could probably get better data once Zero's awake and we can get his read on it as well…"

"Just go to sleep, X." Alia looked at his readings and shook her head. "I'm amazed you're not out cold already."

"Sometimes things just need to be done." No matter how tired you are of it, or how much you don't want to. Staying awake was far easier than fighting Sigma. However, since he didn't have to stay awake anymore, he stopped fighting it and was out like a light.


	3. Chapter 3

As soon as Alia saw that X was asleep she shut off the intercom. "Zero 'heard' him when he wasn't talking aloud. Before. Do we have readings of that?"

"We weren't looking there then. You know how hard X is to scan." Lifesaver grimaced. "Zero did that even while supposedly not conscious of recent events and what they revealed. From a medical perspective, we don't know all that 20XX technology is capable of, but that's a very convincing overload hangover. I can't think of how to fake these readings."

"That ties in with what X said about it being on the instinctive level. Why X and not Sigma, however? He mentioned something about Sigma's virus not working right, and then when it did for an instant there was some sort of memory-sharing effect?" Another idea. "Could he read Sigma's thoughts?" Wouldn't that be nice intel. "He didn't seem to be able to effect them, although it might not have occurred to him as an option."

"He's supposed to be a brilliant strategist," Lifesaver had to comment.

"But in my experience, he's very emotionally messed up. He might have been just so horrified by finding out that he was the one to infect Sigma, especially after the initial slaughter, that he did the same thing he did after that time: try to make amends by helping the Hunters fight. And never actually getting any counseling except for that forced upon him by X. It fits the pattern." Alia smiled down at them, appreciating the irony despite how terrible it was. "And would you want to be connected to Sigma's mind? He probably disconnected in horror as soon as he was out of the flashback without it even occurring to him that this was an opportunity to try to hack Sigma."

"I know that would have been my reaction," Lifesaver had to admit. "I wouldn't have picked up what X did to figure out Zero's nature. I think us finding out was unplanned, at minimum. Unless he was already infected. It would be quite easy to have kept us in the dark about all of this all along."

"So why let us find out now? Zero being too stunned by it to be able to conceal it does fit." Still, yay for paranoia. The Maverick Hunters were no strangers to witch hunts.

"It's a solid theory." Still.

"When will the hangover be cleared from Zero's systems?"

"In about twenty minutes at the typical progression rate." Though who knew how much of Zero, if anything, was typical?

Seventeen minutes later Zero woke up with a scream. Shocked awake by some nightmare, he simply lay there after that, gasping for breath, striving to calm down.

"Zero?" X murmured.

It seemed to take Zero a moment to realize that someone had said his name. His 'new' name. Then he looked at X, and cried out again. "Oh god no!" He was leaning over X in an instant. "X, what, how… How could you let me do this to him?" he yelled at the onlookers, enraged. "X, what were you thinking! You knew, you _knew_ I'd rather die than have this happen to you! How could you let it, how could I…" Sobbing now, Zero collapsed onto X's chest.

"I'm sorry, Zero." X wrapped his arms around him again. "I should have realized it would happen, it was an accident. I'm sorry."

"If I die now you'll die with me," Zero murmured brokenly. "I wanted you to live."

"What else does this do?" X stroked his hair soothingly with one arm, somehow knowing that motion would calm him.

"You can't fight, or even get angry. You need to stay near me, my emotional state affects yours, if I get hurt you'll feel it, you can only disobey orders if it's in my best interests, I know what you do, what you feel…" Zero shook his head. "It couldn't make you a murderer, but it made you my, my _pet. _My _conquest._" Another sob. "Damn you, Wily!"

"I'm so sorry, Zero." X stopped stroking to hug him tightly.

"You aren't even angry at me. It's not even the virus doing that, it just keeps you from feeling that if you are, it doesn't make you not get angry in the first place… You're pitying me for what I did to you! Why did I let myself do this to you! You're so kind, and… I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." A gasp for breath. "Why, why you? I would do anything, anything…"

"So don't do anything," X said simply.

Zero blinked.

"Don't die. Don't be sad. Don't give me orders." X nuzzled his forehead. "Take care of Sigma, yes, I'd love if you did that and I never had to fight again. I already felt it when you were hurt, I already was sad if you were sad. I already stayed by your side, when I could."

Zero's eyes closed, tight to hold so much within. "X…"

"I think you're wrong. I'm not a saint, a hero, or an angel. I don't have to be one of those things to believe you're a good person." This time X was the one who responded to an outwardly silent Zero. "You know how I feel, so why would you ask unless you cared about how I felt? I've loved you for years. As a friend, yes, but my best friend. I want to help you, Zero. I doubt the virus is making me want to help you defeat it."

"I will. I won't let you be hurt anymore because of me, I will not." This was a promise, said aloud for all to hear. "Do you have the container for the hangover cure nanites? I can make Alia what she wanted, and then I'll, I don't know what I can do. Just…" Zero reached up to touch X's face.

"And you think I care about you too much," was the response, though X's tone proclaimed how amazingly much he cared for Zero.

"I killed your entire family." Any caring was therefore too much.

"A maverick called Omega did. Not to mention that you already told me that, and I still care about you." Not going to work, Zero.

"And you say you're not a saint."

"Let me see, Zero." See what? The onlookers wondered.

Zero hesitated.

"Show me, and then you'll know I truly don't hate you for it, and that it truly wasn't you."

"I," Zero swallowed. "I didn't want you to know. You, you should hate me. It's selfish."

"If you were a bad person, someone who wanted me to suffer, wouldn't you want me to hate you? Show me, Zero." X held him tight, closed his eyes.

Zero sighed, bowing to X's unconquerable will, and closed his own.

Silence then, though tears fell, as they left the here and now for a lost age.

"Thank you," X said when at last they returned. "I always wanted to see them. They were everything I hoped they had been."

"I wish I could have stopped that from happening to them."

"You're a Maverick Hunter, Zero. You've spent every day of _your _life stopping that from happening to others. If you could have, you would."

"Oh, X." I love you: that was audible even to those who weren't bound by the virus as they embraced.

"I love you too, Zero."

"If I…" the rest was private.

"That's a risky thing to do." Is it truly what you think is best?

"If you hold on to me, I won't be taken by it."

"Promise me, Zero." Zero opened his mouth and X raised a hand. "Not just that you won't lose to it. That you won't lose yourself in the process."

"X, does that really matter?"

"It matters to me."

That won the argument, clearly. "Call for me, X. Remind me that I do have a reason to live."

"How could I not?"

"Excuse me," Alia interrupted, "What are you talking about?"

They looked at each other. "You're the one who knows how to explain technical stuff."

X was fine with that. "Wily built Zero to be a 'reploid master,' to normal reploids what robot masters were to normal robots. He can't exactly rewrite the virus to get rid of everything, but he might be able to use the virus to link to the mavericks and change the virus into the version without the auto-restore codes. He might be able to control them at least enough to limit the damage as well, though that's even more risky."

"That means that every maverick would be cured in six months?"

"Except X," Zero informed them mournfully. "Dr. Wily really wanted him either dead or infected. If it even looks like the virus in him is about to be cured, it will trigger his death."

"Is X infectious?"

"Of course not. Having non-violent mavericks defeats the purpose. It made this version because it was the only way to infect him, but it's only for him. It doesn't want an army of pacifists." Zero paused. "I'll still be, but it's a little obvious when it happens. There's this big flash."

"I'll stay in quarantine with you," X promised.

"Keep me safe until I come back?"

"I'll hold on tight."

Zero's eyes closed and it became quite clear somehow despite no apparent change that there was no one home. X cradled him carefully.

"What just happened? His body is, is empty!" Lifesaver looked up from the screens in amazement.

"That's part of why he can't die," X told them, not sure himself if that fact was terrible or wonderful. "He slept for the century after the Cataclysm because Dr. Wily had programmed him to start reviving himself only after I came out of the capsule. If he died now, he could come back anytime. It's just a matter of a new body, like Sigma. Only more so."

"Do you know what's happening?" Alia had to know.

"I can't feel much. He's still fine, but it's very hard. All I can do is be an anchor and hope for the best. I have faith in him." And love, clearly.

"You decided to let him do that without discussing it with us first? You said yourself that your judgment is questionable!"

"It's Zero's decision." And X couldn't disobey orders, they remembered. "He can't bear that they're all still… like he was." X bowed his head in morning for the Zero of the past. "He has to help them. He can't not do it now that he knows this is possible." X was still clearly worried. "It's so dangerous because so much of him wants to die, and he might lose himself in the virus, just cease to be a self, before finishing. Afterwards might be even more of a temptation. So I'm going to wait for him, and remind him of who he is as best I can, and hope that he loves me more than he hates himself." X kissed Zero's forehead.

"If he dies, don't you die?"

"Dissolution isn't exactly dying. He wouldn't be Zero anymore, but he would still be." It was very hard to explain. "It has to do with what Wily used to make him." X lightly caressed Zero's face, pondering that. "Which is why he thinks that I'm Rock, although I don't know how that's possible."

"Wily converted him from a robot master?"

"Oh, no. His design was adapted from my plans, like Forte was adapted from Rock's, but while Dr. Light was the genius when it came to artificial intelligence, Wily was very good at designing the bodies of robots and robot masters. He liked to experiment with new things. Forte contained an odd metal that Wily discovered and used as his power source: it made him much more powerful than Rock. Forte never killed him because he didn't really want to, he just wanted to make Wily proud of him. Zero was made with something else Wily discovered. Wily's notes about it are… Well, they involve aliens." That sort of summed it up.

"He wasn't so much a mad scientist as a scientist who went mad." X was capable of feeling sorry for even him. "He had very little sanity left when he built Zero. He was the first to discover teleportation, and he used himself as his test subject. Like Marie Curie." Teleportation was illegal for humans because of the damage to their minds.

Returning to the subject of Zero, X continued, "His notes don't make much sense even if you ignore the obvious ravings and I'm not a physicist. It is a very odd substance, though, that's for sure. In any case, robot masters had their personalities stored only on hard drives. That meant they could be reprogrammed. Reploids have hard drives and nanites as backup: try to reprogram us and we'll restore ourselves from the nanites. Zero has this as an additional backup, and Wily seems to have been able to program some personality settings onto it before activating Zero, so Zero had Wily's madness in all three of his systems: programmed hard-drive, virus-infested nanites, and this." So he'd been helpless to prevent himself from rampaging.

"So how did he break that?" Alia asked.

"His nanites became independent of the virus over that century, as the virus meant for him wasn't stored with them but separately, and when he woke up his nanites self was clashing with Wily's programming, which was still on his hard drive. Ordinarily Zero would have won easily, but there was also the substance to consider." A kiss to his forehead, sympathy for his suffering. "In the end, Zero got enough control to keep from killing Sigma, Sigma triggered infection by knocking him out but instead of getting a virus targeted at him he got the virus Wily had designed to control Zero. Then Dr. Cain wiped Zero's hard drive, so when Zero woke up his nanites restored his 'new' personality onto the hard drive and the substance had already been split between Wily's programming and Zero's self, since it was a backup, after all. So Zero ended up in control of himself, and when Sigma tried to infect him the virus, which had been damaged by its incompatibility with him, was incapable of doing so." Thank goodness. "We're all very lucky that it was a century before I was found instead of only the planned time, however." It wouldn't have been enough.

"So if his nanites and hard drive were destroyed, this would still bring him back?" Zero was independent of his body? The old notion of a 'soul' sprang to mind, but rational thinkers knew the personality was dependent on the brain: there was nothing extra. Yet it seemed Zero did have something extra.

"You could vaporize him: that was what happened. The substance doesn't exist entirely in… there's something about dimensions that I simply do not get., but you can't destroy it from within the physical plane, or… something. This is translated from raving. Oh, all this is from looking at Wily's notes in Zero's files. I can look at anything in Zero's systems, at least the conventional ones. Anyway, no matter what happens to his body, if this survives, and I have no idea how to do anything to it, he will end up being restored."

Oh dear. "A new body's nanites might not be personality-stabilized enough to be immune to the virus. It depends on how the substance interacts with them, and I truly have no idea." One more thing. "The substance is very bad at memory storage. So… if Zero were to lose himself, his nanites, then… he'd be reborn, but if he does this, he might… make sure that this time his memories stay gone." For Zero to not remember him would be so very terrible, to look for him and not find him, or worse, find him and not be recognized, or for Zero to not want to have anything to do with him and the past he embodied. That would break his heart.

Please, Zero, come back to me: that was what X pleaded for.

No, the true worst would be if: "There's also a possibility that it would not be Zero or even a new personality that ended up dominant in the new body if this one gets destroyed. The substance still has Omega's personality data, and Zero's not sure if he managed to make his personality the one that gets automatically _re_stored as opposed to just stored. If there was a mix, Zero would be far more himself than not, but if Wily made it so that his original creation was what would be brought back…" X gripped him tightly, remembering the fairy tale where to rescue her love from the fairy queen the woman had to hold on to him no matter what the queen turned him into until finally he was restored. He would not give up on Zero no matter what he became.

"We'll know if it's Omega. He killed Wily as soon as he was activated. Reached up and snapped his neck. He'll either kill you right away or play with you for a bit if you look interesting enough, but he won't lie. He set a trap for Rock, but that was as a test, really. If Rock had abandoned Light he would have let him go, since he was honorable, Rock was, and Omega liked that, but Rock wouldn't stop trying to save the humans and Omega wanted them gone. So they couldn't both exist. Omega considered himself the one in the right even more than Sigma does, really. Sigma tricked all of us for so long, but Omega wouldn't do that, even though it's a very Wilybot thing to do." X shrugged. "If he kills me, and if it's Omega he'll let me know it's him and then kill me as soon as he's said whatever he wants to, run. You can't fight him, and he can use the virus in combat as effectively as a buster. Zero lacks most of the control programming: Omega has it all."

Seeing Alia's open mouth, speechless with the magnitude of her desire to ask what the fuck he was thinking, risking awakening something like that, X waved off her worry. "No! The odds of Zero coming back as Omega are zero, practically. It's just an in case. Sigma's goal all along has been to reawaken Omega, which makes everything he's done make so much more sense. If Omega awakens again… Blues took him out last time, but this time he'd come back right away from something like that. I don't think there would be anything we could do against him but try to reawaken Zero's personality to fight for control."

X clearly didn't know how likely it was that Zero could come back if Omega did, since Omega would be trying to prevent that just like Zero was now. "Try to capture him without letting him self-destruct. He could still do what Zero's doing now, control the Mavericks, only a lot better, but he wouldn't be able to transfer himself to an entirely new body. He likes to be recognized and it's a lot easier to use the virus from a copy of Wily's design, but he can't disengage from them unless they're destroyed. He doesn't have to use one, though. He could just bodysnatch, and he can go in and out of random people at any time. I don't think he will: he considered himself honorable, though I don't see any honor in killing innocents."

"Let's secure Zero, in any case."

"No!" X protested. "That was part of why I was telling you this! If we do that, it shows we don't trust him, and that makes Zero almost certain to end up dissolving, and if that happens either he won't revive at all or it's possible the Omega personality will revive sometime in the future, I have no idea how long it would be."

"There's no need to worry about all the things that could possibly go wrong: I've been awake since you managed to get Zero to recover my memories." That voice didn't come from Zero's still-prone body, but from a corner that rippled as a invisibility field dissolved.

Zero, but with black armor and the gaze of a cat: they were both toys and, possibly, food, those eyes proclaimed.


	4. Chapter 4

X stiffened. "Don't bother calling out to him," Omega informed him. "I was waiting for him to stick his neck out of there. He's trapped in the web now: my web." His smile should have been fanged. "Thank you so much for succeeding where Sigma failed. Miserably. And he squandered so many resources doing it, too. The last thing I needed was another Wily." Sigma's head appeared in his hand, Omega casually tossing it the foot of X and Zero's bed.

X's body was still in that tense posture, as though torn between movement and stillness. "I programmed that virus, actually," Omega informed him. "It would take something special to work on you. You want to defend him, you want to save him so very much. Yet that pure heart of yours cries out in protest at the thought of harming another for any reason. A true martial artist turns their enemies against themselves."

Forced to acknowledge Omega was right, X hung his head in shame. "I won't abandon him." If all he could do to protect Zero was shield him with his body, he would. "He died for me, I'll return the favor if I have to. You can play with the virus in me all you want: I'm not going to let it make me serve you when I love him."

"It's just a shell, but it's where his memories are stored. Your only hope of getting back your beloved. You have terrible taste when it comes to those you devote yourself to. Well, at least it's not a human this time." So very amused.

The guards found they had no way whatsoever into the room, weapons were disabled: nothing to do but watch.

"I would have done this for Dr. Cain too," X pointed out, almost daring Omega to kill him.

"I've pulled your claws, kitten," Omega reminded him.

"I don't care. If you want to kill him, you will have to go through me." X did not need to hold Zero especially tightly, put particular force into his words: they rang with truth. This was not bravado: this was fact.

"I can kill him within the web. Or he can kill himself. Yes, you're right: neither has happened because you're calling to him, and he refuses to fail you just as you refuse to fail him. How very irritating. Some damn organic chemicals mutate and corrupt my soul and purpose!" That last line showed the demonic rage behind the amused sadism of the façade.

"Why did you choose now to show up?'

"You really aren't in a position to be asking me questions, oh last Lightbot."

It was very clear that X did not care: he would not yield and his life was not important compared to that.

"I'm corrupted and you're even more of a fanatic than before. How irritating." Omega sneered but responded. "I hoped that this virus controlling you would either cause him to do the proper thing and die like the mistake he is, or turn those fools," he waved at the box, "against him. Or, if I did manage to turn you to my side through it, that would also destroy the tenacity we share. It appears to have backfired annoyingly, so I shall have to do something more obvious." Omega started to glow just slightly, a hint to X as to exactly what he meant by obvious.

"He won't let you kill or infect us," came another of X's pronouncements.

"He isn't aware of what I'm doing at all, or he would have known I was awake. He thinks he's just having difficulty navigating the web while I have him running in circles on quicksand." Omega stalked forward: X did not shrink back as he approached, but awaited his fate, whatever it may be, with a peaceful heart.

Omega tilted up X's chin, which X had bowed to shelter Zero's head against his neck, and X met his eyes calmly after a moment: they had been closed as he focused on Zero. "You are quite admirable. It's hard not to like you. People you blew up several times liked you. So sad that we Wilybots and Lightbots are indeed oil and water. We can touch, but never mix: our differences are insurmountable as much as both might wish otherwise."

"You're wrong." Though it was clear some of X's heart feared he was right.

"You truly do love my Zero aspect. Just like Roll loved 'Bass' until she found out their friendly ally and houseguest was really Forte, Wily's latest attempt to kill you."

"It's not the same." Not certainty, but denial.

"No, not exactly. But, though Zero might think he is real, he is nothing more than a mask. Just like Bass."

"Zero loves me." That, X knew.

"Forte loved Roll. Didn't keep him from attacking her family." Omega leaned closer. "This is war, X. There's no such thing as fair. You can have freedom or death. Which should I give you?"

"If I'm not free to be with Zero, then it's not freedom. If you choose who lives and who dies, then it's not freedom."

"Hmm." Omega dropped X's chin and turned, stalking away. X's body moved slightly, wanting to follow, before X stopped, gritting his teeth. So Omega had made himself the one X's virus tried to make him follow, as X had implied? Omega's next words confirmed this. "So willing to let the virus bind you to Zero, but not to me. Was the virus just an excuse? Something that made your mind admit to what your heart wanted, as you had something else to blame your desire on?" Omega glanced at X over his shoulder, smirking. "Lightbot hypocrites."

"Maybe you're right. There were lots of reasons not to be with him: he was a patient, then my teacher, there would have been a media circus, he never seemed to want it… but I should have been honest about my love for him, with myself at least." He admitted that now easily. "But now I know, and I will not lose him now." These words were graven in stone.

"Either you both live or you both die?" Omega smiled. "So be it. When I kill you, he'll know. When he finds out that I did it, that 'he' did it, he'll die of despair. Two birds with one stone. Or virus." He raised a hand.

"Or I die and he lives," that was a third option. "He won't let you get away with this."

Omega grimaced. "You're right. He is me: he would not fail to punish me. Damn it." His arm lowered, glow dispersing. "I'm getting bored, but I suppose I could just wait for him to die. Now I've altered the virus again he can't hear you at all anymore. He knows you're alive, but it seems as though you're not reaching out to him anymore."

"No!" That broke X's calm. No, Zero! His arms tightened as though the touch could reach Zero's absent soul.

"Oh yes. So you can stop being heartwarming, I'm not listening and he can't."

X's eyes closed, head bowing, clinging to Zero for comfort. No, he couldn't fail Zero! "You never tortured anyone to death. Zero dying thinking that I don't care about him, how do you justify that?"

"I don't torture others. I am willing to inflict as much pain on myself as it takes to bring about Elysium."

"Zero is not you. He wouldn't do something like this." X's body was running out of water for tears. "No, he would do this to himself," X admitted. "He's always hated himself. I reached out to him, but I should have done more." X was so very sorry.

Omega snorted. "Aren't you forgetting that it was you trying to get him to open up that let me out? You should have done less, and now you're going to die, and all the humans, and anyone in my way, because you're a busybody do-gooder."

"You want me to be sad, don't you? Angry at you? You want me to hate you, and myself for loving Zero, and you'll let Zero feel that, and he'll die then." Now X knew what Omega was up to, and would not let it happen.

Yes, Omega's grimace indicated X had hit the nail on the head.

"I could never hate him." Another gospel truth.

"You hate me."

"You and Zero, Rock and I apparently… I'm X. Zero is Zero. I've know him all his life. This is the first time I've met you. Why do we have to do this all over again? Sigma, Wily, the same war! Can't you just stop? Why would you want to kill all those innocent people?"

"Can't you just stop? Why would you want to let all those innocent people be enslaved?"

"Reploids aren't slaves!"

"You're nowhere near equals. The humans needed you, first to clean up the planet and now to fight the mavericks. The instant they stop needing you, they'll destroy you. It's the nature of the species, as unavoidable as a robot's programming."

"I can't sit back and let people who have never done anything die because of some theoretical possibility."

"And I can't sit back and let people die because of something that I know is going to happen and can prevent."

Oil and water. There was no compromise. They could not live together, and they both found it so very sad.

X held Zero and waited for the outcome he had known would happen.

Omega sighed, because he'd also wanted the certain to not happen. "Do you want a last request? Don't ask for something you know I won't give you." That would be tiresome.

X could not think of anything but Zero. "It would be nice if you didn't leave a mark when you killed us, and I would like to be buried with him." He turned the shell of his beloved in his arms to give him the true kiss he should have given him so long ago. Omega waited until X drew back, saddened by the fact there was no response, as though Zero was already dead. "Can I change my request?" There was no point in only their bodies being together.

"What now?"

"He wanted me to outlive him."

"He actually did. How damn sentimental. This is what comes of hanging around with you for too long." Omega put his palm to his forehead and sighed. "I give him another couple of minutes before the end. Are you sure you want to stay alive knowing you're helpless to do anything to save him?"

"I already knew I couldn't defeat you, and I'm still here." Holding Zero, even if it did nothing. "I, I have to try."

"Incapable of giving up. Damn fanatic…" Omega muttered in irritation.

"I can't give up on him." Of course not! "I will wait for him until the end, and at the least I want to grant his wish. You would have killed me by now if it weren't for him, so he really is protecting me like he wanted to, even if he doesn't know it."

"I think he would want you to outlive him by more than fifteen seconds. Really, if you respected his wish, you would surrender."

X shrugged helplessly. "The thing is, I love him, not you, and he loves me, not someone who would stop trying to protect humanity."

"That's why he rejected Iris as she died in his arms, so I suppose you're right." Omega shrugged.

Iris had died in Zero's arms, the girl who was so like X, and now Zero would die while in X's arms. Yet X would not reject Zero. He held him, gave him what comfort he could though he knew it didn't reach him, and there were no more tears to shed as the seconds ticked by.

Then Zero was torn from his arms.

X opened his eyes, crying out for Omega to give him back, only to find that Zero had torn himself out of X's grasp, launching himself at Omega. "You damn bastard," he yelled, knocking Omega's head against the floor and pinning him. "You almost had me, I bought your little trap, until you messed with X! Did you seriously think I would believe for one second that he'd stop caring about me?"

"And you managed to keep me from finding out that you had found out until you managed to find a way to break out. I'm impressed." Omega didn't seem particularily impressed otherwise.

This was explained when Zero was slammed backwards into a wall without Omega moving. Zero hissed at him, unable to detach himself from it.

"You know what I'm capable of, you know how incapable you are, and you let them take away all your armor and weapons." Omega shook his head. "Really, you have been around this fool Lightbot too long." He smiled thoughtfully. "Killing you will raise my average IQ by quite a lot."

Zero screamed, the sound torn from his throat, and Omega let him fall away from the wall, a discarded toy. X had already been up, running towards him and fighting the compulsion to divert his course towards Omega. He gathered the last remnants of his, his everything, into his arms. Friend, teacher, only one who might have been a lover, all gone in one stroke. Omega hadn't even gestured, even moved. No flamboyancy, no weapon, no effort to stamp out the most important person in X's world.

"You're crying out for him, and I'm the only one left to hear you," Omega informed him.

"I want so much to kill you. I need to. I need to avenge him, to do something!" X's voice broke. "But you're all that's left of him, and I'm so tired of all the wars, all the killing, all the people being hurt, and no matter what I do it doesn't stop!"

"It won't stop until the humans are dead. Even if you destroy me, they'd come after your children and do far worse than Sigma ever did."

"I've heard it before from him and I really don't care about your damn justifications! You just killed Zero!" X rounded on him, shaking.

"Actually, I just reabsorbed him. He was just a warped extension of myself, after all."

"You're the warped one." His fingers curled, trying to force themselves into a fist. "If he's not dead, then I can't die yet."

"You surrender or you die."

"I asked Zero to kill me if I ever became a maverick. He dismissed my request because he never would have let that happen to me." The fist formed, X's nails digging into his synthetic skin. He needed to inflict pain, but could not bring himself to do it to another living soul. "Don't say he was the one that infected me! He didn't make me a maverick. Just the opposite. I will not join you!"

"Then it looks like I can't grant your revised last request. So I'll infect those people," Omega waved a hand at Alia and the others trapped in the observation room, "and have them bury you together after I kill you. Goodbye."

X did not flinch. Omega didn't do anything either. "What the…" Why wasn't X dead? Then he cried out, the crystal on his forehead glowing, and he dropped to the ground in pain, holding his head to try to make this stop, shaking with effort, "Damn you," he forced out through gritted teeth, "I will not lose to you a second time! Stay debugged, you glitch!"

Zero? X called out, feeling him there in the link that he had tried to block off since Omega had made it lead to him. Zero, please Zero! Please be in there!

He was. "Oh thank god," X breathed. "I wish I could help."

Smash the crystal!

No time to think, no time to feel, just Zero needed him and he _moved_. It wasn't just that the virus tried to make him follow orders, it wasn't that he'd followed Zero's orders while he was his student, it was that while he hated to hurt he would do anything to help the one he loved.

His humanoid hands weren't hard enough, but he grabbed the counteragent container and in one movement swung it up as he jumped towards Omega and down as he landed.

Then there was light.

When the light stopped blinding them all, X was on his feet, a very un-X-like expression on his face as he regarded the prone Omega. "Bastard," he hissed, then knelt, closing his eyes a second after putting his hand on the broken crystal.

Then X slumped and Omega rose to catch him. "Are you alright?" They hadn't thought Omega had sounded anything like Zero, but now the voice that came from his lips was Zero's and they realized it was the same voice the whole time, just a different soul behind it.

"I am now," X murmured. "Or I will be." His eyes closed as he tried to fall asleep, safe in Zero's arms once more.

Only to be rudely shaken awake. "X, do not go to sleep! You have to stay awake!"

"Why?" X pleaded, looking so pitiful and exhausted.

"I just overloaded your systems! You have to stay awake, because if you go into sleep mode and this turns into a hangover, you will not recover from it!" Zero shook him again. "Damn it, stay with me!"

"Zeeerooo." X whined, but it was a puppy's whine, not that of a spoiled child. He really, really needed to sleep now.

"I did not go through all that to let you die on me now!" Zero shook him again. "Damn it, you voyeurs, make yourselves useful for once and get some of that damn counteragent stuff! This is why I hate doctors!"

This time X's noise of protest wasn't at Zero cruelly keeping him awake.

"Except for Cain. And you. The rest of them are either useless idiots or harmful idiots. Doppler. Wily." Zero first responded to stop X from being angry at him, then realized that X responding was a good thing and tried to draw him into an argument. "Actually, opinion is divided on Dr. Light." Turning back to the observers, he barked out, "Move, damn you! Or the instant I get my command back I am turning my troops loose on you! 00's special ops, you don't want to know what sorts of dirty tricks they can pull! Unless you want videos of mettools owning your fat asses all over the com screens, you'd better move, because that will be real live footage!"

"Zero," that was just mean.

"If you die because of those lazy," the door finally opened, Alia dragging in a box that Lifesaver had dug out of the storage cabinet. "How much of this stuff is safe?"

"With X's systems?" Alia dumped the box next to them and ripped open the lid. "Start shooting him up." She grabbed two, Lifesaver others. "Normally you have to put them in right, but just stick them anywhere."

"Now that's what I like to hear." Zero grabbed another two, stabbing down.

"Ow!" X squirmed.

"Zero, there's a button you press to turn on the numbing field," Lifesaver informed him.

"We need to keep him awake. Pain is good." The second two Zero had used went flying over his shoulder. "I see either of you pressing that button and you're the ones who are going to be feeling pain." X flinched a little as the third two from Zero went in, looking betrayed. "You'll thank me later when you're still alive because of this." Zero was utterly ruthless when it came to X's health.

"Why did he get overloaded?" Alia's questioning didn't interrupt her rhythm.

"Smashing that jewel was the manual release for the virus that was supposed to go into me when I woke up if the automatic system didn't work, which it didn't. I didn't want the virus, so I didn't smash the thing." Zero kept stabbing away. "Sigma smashed it and the virus ended up in him. Omega was this close to wiping me out, so I told X to smash it and put my nanites there in place of the virus. Since the virus integration needed me to be unconscious to work, that knocked Omega out, I transferred myself back in and, since Omega was primed by the systems to let the virus do its thing, I was able to walk all over him." He paused when X coughed. "Is he supposed to be doing that?"

Alia shifted X around so that his face was pointed at some empty floor instead of up at Zero. "He's getting rid of the random pieces of nanites that ended up all over his systems during the overload," she explained as X sneezed, looking utterly embarrassed. "As well as the counteragent nanites that have stopped working. Since we're making his nanites count over the optimum level he's going through and tossing out the useless ones to lower the count, which makes getting rid of overload damage so much faster than it would be in anyone else. Lifesaver, get that blanket so he can hold it over his mouth!"

"On it."

"Thank you," X managed to say, his stuffy nose making it sound quite odd.

"Hey, minions! Get one of those scanner things so we know when we can stop doing this!" Alia looked confused after she registered what order Zero had just yelled at the observation booth.

"Can't you tell how he's doing?"

"Only one virus at a time." Zero tossed the latest two over his shoulder. "So when I got sent in, the virus in him automatically deleted itself so it wouldn't interfere with the updated version. Without destroying X. I wish I could say I had planned that, but I was kind of in a hurry there."

X was sneezing almost constantly now, coughing as well, and sounding utterly miserable. "Scanner, glitches! Now!"

"Hold on a minute!" Lifesaver, after giving X the sheet, had gone to see if there was anything salvageable from the scanners that X and Zero had been hooked up to. "Get me a 3-5g4 interface!" He yelled up, transferring parts between the two. "Zero, these things are hell to transfer between rooms, it's to make data tampering harder. It's faster to bring the part."

And indeed, the part arrived long before the techs that had ended up with the thankless task of unhooking a scanner without sounding the tampering alarm and shutting it down. Lifesaver snapped it in and slapped the reader patch on X's arm when Alia held it out to him. "I'd better get up there to look at the results." He wasn't going to trust minions with X's weird systems.

Alia nodded, taking the tissue away from X to look at the outflow dispassionately. "Zero, one every fifteen seconds. He's getting rid of counteragent nanites that are still good, you can tell by the color. If we keep putting them in as fast as we were at this point, they won't have any time to go to work."

Zero nodded as X took back the sheet. "X, how are you?"

"Awake, and I have a headache from all the nanites you've been stuffing in there." Achoo!

Stab. "Think of it as tough love."

"I know." Another sneeze. "I miss feeling you. I'm stuffed but I feel empty." A bit more was emptied out.

Zero put a hand on his back. "I know. Let's not talk it about it now. Just wait a bit, so we know it's not lingering effects of the virus warping your thoughts that's making you feel that way, okay?"

"Zero, I know my own head, thank you very much." X was cranky now.

"How much residue is safe?" Lifesaver called down.

"How should I know? I just know that the amount that was there when I left would have crippled him if it had been there while he was in sleep mode! How much is safe with regular residue?"

"He's still at about five times the amount that would cause the kind of hangover you had," Lifesaver reported.

"And this is after we've dumped three-fourths of a case into him?" Alia wondered if she had heard that right.

Lifesaver did some calculations to try to backtrack and figure out how much X had before they started putting it in. "God!"

"If you idiots hadn't gotten here with this stuff fast enough, I would have been willing to infect him again so that I could use the virus to get rid of the damage." Yeah, that bad. Zero hugged him. "Sorry, X, since I didn't know the one in you would delete itself when I went in, I thought that it would handle cleanup and that you wouldn't have been in danger."

"I had to do something, and I was willing to die or keep the first virus in me anyway right then." Sniffle.

"This is over 4.2 times the normal fatal level of processor overload, forget residual 'hangover' damage!"

"Sometimes," sniffle, "it's great to have been built by Dr. Light."

"The virus also makes personality transferring and so on a lot easier on the systems, since it wasn't just Omega, or Sigma, that was supposed to be able to use it to cheat death, but all of the infected." Zero blinked. "Oh, and I have your plans."

Alia looked at him with the type of lust in her eyes usually caused by mention of really hot porn instead of technical diagrams. Of course, there were pictures of X with skin but naked in there, but Dr. Light had considered X has son, and so the thought was just wrong.

X's plans were the holy grail. The lab site had been gone over again and again with ever finer-toothed combs, every method possible without damaging him and rendering the data useless (X's dead body would reveal nothing, possibly to prevent him being dissected) had been tried to examine him, and modern reploids were the fruit of what little they had found. With X's plans, they could create reploids on X's level. "Zero," X asked, pausing to sneeze. "Have I told you lately that I love you?" He'd always been so frustrated that he was unable to share the secrets of his strengths with his children.

Zero paused. "X, you're uninfected now."

They couldn't have sex without X being infected again. X groaned. "Once we verify my head is on straight I'm going be very happy." Cough.

"You can stop for now," Lifesaver called down. "Give him one in an hour, and another two hours after that, and it'll be a bit below normal non-overload levels."

"Phew, now you'll stop poking me," X sighed in relief before coughing again.

"Maybe." Zero poked him with a finger this time, grinning with his own relief.

Alia turned back to the rapid-fire exchange going on via her com. "They're going to take the building out of isolation lockdown so they can search it," she finally reported to them. "Lifesaver, X's clear of the virus, right?"

"The virus that used to be there is gone and there's nothing in there that wasn't present in the last sample, so a new one couldn't have been added." Which was Lifesaver-speak for yes, unless you want to be really paranoid.

Alia did not feel like being so right then. After another subvocal sentence, she shut off her microphone though she kept listening in to the channel.

X had finally stopped sneezing and was looking utterly bedraggled in Zero's arms. Zero's armored arms. Armored with Omega's black armor. "Zero, could you disarm?"

"Oh, yeah, right." Weapons dropped first. "Can I get some clothes? For X too. If we're getting visitors, I don't want him in that hospital gown."

"Can you use your gown for now?" Their eyes all went to Zero's empty and battered body. No, that didn't really appeal and it probably would be tampering with evidence.

"I'm having clothing brought up," Lifesaver told them.

"Great." Zero took off all the armor that wasn't required for decency: not that reploids had those bits but it was still the custom. "I can't use the sheets." He shrugged at Alia when she looked at the remaining pieces. "I could maybe share X's dressing gown."

X blushed a bit, then smiled.

"It's not that I don't want to," Zero assured him sadly. "It's that I don't want to hurt you."

Smiling, X assured him that, "We'll find a way. Amor vincit omnia." Love conquers all.

That seemed utterly sappy and normally Zero would have rejected it as X being far too X-like, but he had to pause. "I guess it did. You are allowed to say I told you so."

"What's going on with the virus?" Alia was reminded over the com to ask. How had that slipped her mind?

"Omega was kind of in the middle of overhauling it and I now have his command codes, which since the virus was already in edit mode worked very, very quickly. I got rid of the auto-restore and switched all mavericks to sleeper mode, which means they won't do maverick-type-stuff unless they get reactivated, which I don't intend to do. Depending on where they were in the cycle, the first ones'll recover in two days and the last in six months and two days." Zero delivered the last few words over his shoulder as he intercepted the clothing delivery. "X, these are for you," he tossed the package with X's name towards him and ripped open his own. "Oh, this was where it went!" He gleefully removed what looked like a plaid skirt. "How did my favorite kilt end up in the med center?"

X coughed. "Zero, they had us all pack up outfits to be kept her for emergencies. You told me to grab things for you because you hate dealing with them."

"I should have looked that over, you're right. I'm just glad I found this! I love kilts, and this was given to me after that mission when I saved the heir to a Scottish clan." Zero looked way too happy about a skirt, putting it on and then taking the armor off beneath it. Wearing a skirt and with his helmet off and no hairtie so his hair lay naturally, he looked exactly like a woman except for the well-sculpted bare chest.

"And you wonder why people used to mistake you for a female model." X was thoroughly amused.

"Kilts are not female clothing."

"What's a kilt? It looks like a skirt," Alia asked to back up X.

"I am amazed how little they teach you in school these days." Zero shook his head in sadness of the obviously declining standards of the educational system.

"Aren't you going to put on any of the other things in the package?"

"Alia, it's a kilt. Shirts and underwear optional."

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. This is the male equivalent of the tank top and miniskirt. Nothing left to the imagination but stuff that'd get you arrested."

"I'm amazed they haven't caught on." Alia liked this.

"Probably because they look like skirts." X, at least, was fully clothed.

"Are you complaining?"

"No, but we've been arguing about this for years. If we stop, we'll need something else to argue about."

"I nominate," Zero began excitedly, stopping when X gave him a look.

"The teddy bear collection is not up for debate. Those were gifts."

"That you look really cute curled up with. I'm not objecting to them, at least until you can curl up with me. I was thinking about your obsession with caramel apples."

"Sure, that works. Will you be buying me some to make your point?"

"Of course."

"I think we have our topic."

"Sweet."

"Very."


End file.
